Complicated legal and policy issues incident to policing--and conflicts with citizens the police serve--persist and continue to motivate empirical work. One under-studied aspect, however, involves the degree to which, if any, adverse (digital) media coverage of instances of police brutality informs police conduct going forward. Policing the Police: Examining the Role of News
Reports on Racially-Biased Policing reflects a recent effort at this difficult research question.
In their paper, Uttara Ananthakrishnan (Wash.--Business) et al., set out to assess the impact of public media accounts of police misconduct/violence from January 2013 to May 2018 (N=6,026) on police-initiated traffic stop data drawn from 227 counties across 18 states. The authors execute a DiD model that, because police traffic stop outcomes are "naturally tied to counties," compares "the change in the number of police stops in counties exposed to news reports with the same change in control counties that did not have news reports about their policing incidents during the same period.” Among the paper's findings is that news reports on fatal uses of police force on minorities have a "negative impact on police stops of minorities but not on Whites, on average.” An excerpted abstract follows.
"... However, it is theoretically unclear whether the reporting of excessive use of police force on minorities can have a tangible impact on subsequent policing outcomes. In this paper, we aim to answer the question of whether and how digital news on police brutality is effective in shaping subsequent police actions. To address this question, we construct a cross-sectional dataset of news reports of police violence and police traffic stop records. Under a difference-indifference framework, we find that news reports on police brutality reduces police stops of minorities. Additionally, we find that news with sad frames are more effective in effectuating change in policing behaviors. Finally, we learn that the impact of news reports are less effective in minority-dominated areas and high-crime areas."
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